


Leather Worry

by McFreeky



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 17:27:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1396357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McFreeky/pseuds/McFreeky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver discovers a box full of a particular item, and he knows there could only be one culprit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leather Worry

“Felicity!”

She jumped. “Don’t do that! We had this conversation, Oliver. Yelling at me is not the way to get my attention. You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Felicity turned her chair from her babies as she caught the faint sound of his boots on the concrete floor. She was getting better at finding him as he moved nearly soundless through the Arrow lair (of course not when she was working a particularly frustrating encryption algorithm that she was nearly done with until her attention was roughly pulled away), but Felicity got the feeling that Oliver was purposefully being louder than normal. She could be intimidating when she wanted to be, and he was doing his best to not draw out her ire.

“What is this?” he asked as he held up the offending item.

She stared at him for a long moment. “Oliver,” she answered, drawing out his name, “that’s a leather jacket.”

He got that half irritated, half exasperated look he got whenever she sassed him. Felicity enjoyed getting those looks from him. Only two women could do so, and she was willing to share that honor with Thea.

“I know it’s a leather jacket. I want to know why it’s in the storage room.”

“You do remember that you spend your nights in leather jackets and a green hood, shooting people who do bad things, right? In fact, I think the jackets you wear look just like that one.”

Oliver let out a frustrated huff. Then, he put his hand inside the jacket, threaded a finger through a hole in the left shoulder, and let it hang from the one hand.

Felicity winced. “Oh,” she breathed. “You found the box.”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding slightly annoyed. “I threw these out.”

“You did.” She stood and quickly crossed the room. She pulled the jacket from his hand and hugged it. “I just un-threw-them-out.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “It seemed like a waste, just throwing them away. You patch the hood if it ever gets torn or pierced or slashed or ripped, and I know it’s because it’s a reminder of Shado and Yao Fei and everything that happened to you on the island. But you just throw these out. They may not mean anything to you, but they do to me. I’m sentimental. I still have my first corsage. Even if the date was awful. Connor kissed me. It was all tongue and so much spit. It ran down my chin. Scarred me. Didn’t even try kissing another boy again until Scott two years later. It was much better. Not as good as-”

“Felicity,” Oliver said calmly.

She realized she was staring at his chest. She brought her eyes up to meet his. There was a faint twitch from the corners of his mouth. He was fighting back a smile, and he only fought the ones he wasn’t expecting. She was both embarrassed and proud. Embarrassed that she let her rambling go so far, but proud she could elicit such a reaction from him.

“Right. The jacket.” She paused, playing with the hole in the front of the jacket and its twin out the back. Of course he would grab the one he was wearing during the earthquake. “I know to you it’s just a piece of leather with a hole in it, but, to me, it’s a reminder that you’re not like the boy in blue over in Metropolis. You’re not invincible even if you come back from firefights without a scratch more often than not. You’re just one man, Oliver.”

Suddenly, hands were on her arms, his thumbs drawing comforting circles there. “But I do come back.”

Felicity nodded, tears pricking her eyes. “That’s another thing they do. They remind me… They tell me no matter how bad your injuries, even after you jam an arrow through your chest, you always come back. Some nights, it’s the only thing keeping me behind the computers and not in my car on my way to save you.”

They stood in silence for a long moment, neither sure what to say. It was Oliver that finally broke the silence.

“I can’t promise I’ll always come back.”

She nodded her head. “I know. No matter how much I want you to, I don’t want you to lie to me either.”

“But I can promise that I will fight. I will fight with all my being to come back to you.”

Felicity rose on her toes and kissed him, the jacket tossed aside so her hands were free to find purchase on his chest. The kiss wasn’t full of lust or heat, but it burned all the same. Oliver wrapped his arms around her, drawing her so close she couldn’t tell if the heartbeat she felt was hers or his.

Eventually, they broke apart, both left breathless by the intensity. Felicity dropped her head to his chest, and Oliver’s hands rubbed slow circles on her back.

“So are all of my discarded jackets in there?” he asked quietly.

She nodded against his chest. “Each one since I’ve been with you.” Then she remembered it wasn’t completely true. “Except for one,” Felicity added as she tried to burrow into his chest to hide her embarrassment.

“Which one is missing?”

She felt herself blushing. It must have circled to the nape of her neck for Oliver’s hand was quick to rise and rest there in an attempt to calm her. It was only marginally successful.

“The one from two months ago, when Digg was gone and you came back with a bunch of shallow cuts everywhere.”

Felicity felt a rumble come from his chest. He was trying to suppress a laugh.

“You mean that time you yelled at me for half an hour.”

She looked up. “You wouldn’t let me clean the wounds.”

“Then you yelled at me for another fifteen after you were done.”

“I still don’t understand why you felt the need to punch a bunch of knife-wielding criminals into unconsciousness when your vigilante name is _The Arrow_.”

“And then you kissed me.”

The sentence hung in the air. It was the night their relationship was irrevocably altered. Both later admitted to the mutual attraction that had been slowly building since they started working together, but it was that night where they could pin the actual change.

“And you kissed me back,” Felicity responded. “Before you bolted.”

She felt him tense. “Because it’s when I realized I loved you. That I love you. It scared me. You scared me.”

She patted him on the chest. He already explained his reaction to her many times over and fought for her forgiveness. She especially enjoyed those nights.

“But I don’t regret it,” he quickly added.

Felicity pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Neither do I.”

She pulled away, feeling cooler as she separated from the furnace that was Oliver Queen. Felicity picked the jacket off the ground and returned it to its box.

“So you never told me where the missing jacket is,” Oliver said as she made her way back.

“It’s at home.”

“Really? Why haven’t I seen it?”

“I hide it.” She was trying to sound as annoyed and irritated as possible at his questions. She really didn’t want the conversation to continue.

Oliver was obviously not deterred. “Why’s that?”

Felicity sighed. “Because it’s embarrassing. Because I put it on sometimes when I go home. A lot of the time. Like when you come back bleeding. Or when you went on that business meeting for a week. Or when I’ve had a bad day and you couldn’t spend the night with me. So all the time, I guess. It calms me down though it’s not nearly as good now since it stopped smelling like you a few weeks ago. And I’m going to stop talking before I make even more of a fool of myself in 3… 2… 1…”

He paused for a long minute before asking, “It calms you down? My smell calms you down?”

She nodded mutely, not trusting her brain-to-mouth filter.

“Well, how ‘bout I wear it all day tomorrow to get my smell infused back into the jacket. But first, I say we head back to your place and see how you would look as The Arrow.”

She snorted. “The jacket is way too big for me. I’m practically swimming in it. I mean, it comes down to my thigh and-”

The words stopped when she noticed something change in Oliver’s expression. The once sly smirk grew into a full predatory smile. His dark and hungry eyes intensified. Felicity had seen that look before. It was the one Oliver got when he found his target or when he and she would...

Oh. OH!

Felicity smiled as she caught on. “And I always find it most comfortable when there is as little as possible between me and the leather,” she added quickly and as sensually as possible.

It was a lie, of course. She usually wore an oversized shirt, comfy pajama pants, and fuzzy socks, but he didn’t need to know that.

The fib worked. Oliver growled at her, sending a tremor through her. It was no surprise that the two of them ended up in her brownstone several hours later in a tangle of sheets with limbs that felt like jelly.

As she shifted to rest her head on his chest, Felicity caught sight of the coat that started it all draped over the headboard, where it landed after Oliver nearly ripped it off her after round three. Taking stock of the pleasant ache between her legs and the slow descent from the ecstasy she was still experiencing from the last bout, she decided to add one more reason to constantly wear the jacket.


End file.
